One-to-one marketing is a kind of database marketing and makes suggestions that meet customer needs on the basis of personal attribute information such as the age, sex, hobbies, preferences, and purchasing history of a customer. A typical method thereof is variable printing. Recently, there has been known a variable printing technique of optimally performing automatic layout of content that differs from customer to customer.
As for application of this technique to direct mail or the like, there is a use case where a printed material is produced while being subjected to a finishing process such as folding and the printed material is sent as postal matter. However, if a finishing position overlaps with content in the printed material, a problem, e.g., a reduction in legibility of a document may occur. As a technique for solving it, a technique of detecting a binding position in a sheet of paper and shifting the whole of an image when the image is located in the binding position is disclosed in Patent Literature 1.
However, when an image is shifted in order to avoid the overlap between a finishing position and content as in the related art, the amount of shift is increased in order to avoid the overlap. Disadvantageously, it may be difficult to obtain a desired result of layout.
Whereas, if the content is not shifted so that the desired result of layout is obtained, the content overlaps with a finishing position. Disadvantageously, for example, toner may come off.
Citation List
Patent Literature
PTL 1: Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 06-219629